are the stars out tonight?

life and stuff

29.11.03

somehow, at 15:06 on the 28th of november, someone came here via this article about pizza from le monde. actually it's not just about pizza, it's about pizza in baghdad, inspired by a post that salam made in may. very strange indeed.

at first glance it appeared to be a lecture about google, and why it's evil and also why certain media sources tend to appear to be more credible on line - because more people link to them they apear higher up on the google ranking, so more people link to them....

(out of curiousity, i just googled 'news', top results: cnn, bbc, abc, fox.)

and i got the opportunity to out myself as a blogger so huzzah for that. and now other people from the course want to set up blogs.

so someone hacked blogrolling. it's all fixed now, but i thought i'd take it as a sign to stop being so darn lazy and have my very own blog roll that doesn't rely on other people. hah. by the way, if i've left you off, leave a comment. sorry.

i am preparing my bedroom for redecoration. actually, i've been doing it since august but i've put on a bit of a spurt recently. magically transforming myself into a combination of trinny and susannah ("now really, why on earth would you own a pair of trousers that ugly", "you're never going to fit into those cords again, just get rid of them!"), kim and aggie ("that's just disgusting, when was the last time you moved this cupboard?"), and that woman off the life laundry ("i know this is hard, but what possible use are you going to have for a copy of your script from watership down?"). in the next few weeks i'll have to become carol smilie in preparation for actually painting it (i'm going for a tasteful latte colour with chocolate details - yes i do think about food three quarters of the time).

yeah, so the point was that in my big clear out of the cupboard that used to contain toys and now contains lots of copies of the face and careless talk costs lives (rip), i found a school magazine from 1995-6, when i was 14. in it i wrote a summary of the year and i thought you might like to see it:

this article is about how it felt to be an upper fourth from '95-96

blur v. oasis, man u winning the double double, jarvis making a stand at the brits, euro '96 - it could only have been the upper fourth! if you were expecting a completely factual acount of field trips etc., stop reading now

blur v oasis i know a girl who bought what's the story and the great escape on the same day. problem was, she thought it would look stupid to get them at the same time, so she sent someone else in to get what's the story, having already bought the other.

chedworth villa a relatively interesting trip around some roman remains and a museum. i particularly liked the 'roman' fire extinguishers.

jarvis at the brits if you are pro-michael, it might be better if you put this down, or skip to the next bit. i think jarvis is in a class of his own (a different class, geddit?). what he did at the brits was the best thing he could have done, and he did not deserve to go to prison!

damon at waterloo can you believe my luck? i would be ill the day my french exchange went home on eurostar, and met blur. oh well, at least i've got his autograph (sigh).

cuckmere gap this consisted of sitting in acoach for five hours, listening to walkmans. then a cold walk up and down a few white cliffs. ah, blows the cobwebs away!

the imperial war museum this trip let us see what it was like down the trenches during the great war. the exhibition was interesting and also touching and shocking.

euro '96 ok so we didn't win, we still had a great time, and uivh's shrine should go down in football history as the most unusual way of professing love for a team!

guess what i cared more about: geography or indie music? it's not really much of a surprise that my headmistress dismissed me a few years later as "obsessed with pop music". although the fact that she was addressing this comment to roger mcgough, a mersey beat poet and member of the scaffold, struck me as pretty ironic.

i just read the cutest email i have ever received. it was so lovely that i had to walk away and give the cat a cuddle and come back and re-read it. total warm fuzzy territory. it had a quote from it's a wonderful life as the subject line. doesn't get much better than that.

but now i have to write a human interest story about a "local boy done good". le sigh.

every morning i get onto the tube to go to college. the tube station i finish at doesn't have escalators, it has lifts, which at about half nine in the morning get very full. so every morning i get to press myself up against a complete stranger in an intimate way. which isn't really what you want first thing, when all you've had time to do is read the mirror or the mail and get pissed off.

which reminds me. someone accused me of being a mirror reader the other day. i thought, well i do buy and read the mirror, but i'm not a mirror reader. i decided i'm like that mysterious group "men who have sex with men" but don't self-define as gay (notoriously hard to reach with hiv warnings). i am someone who buys the mirror, but i do not self-define as a mirror reader. it makes perfect sense to me. actually, i self-define as a guardian reader. because i'm a boring liberal. or so some people would probably say.

another down side to the tabloid reading is that i've started to get worried about stupid things. so on wednesday night, as i walked to the tube station (yup it's true my life does revolve around the underground), i was petrified about getting hit in the face by a stray firework or some scallies chucking a banger at me. give it a few more weeks and i'll be attempting to kill paediatricians.

on another tube-related note, i found this blog via blogsnob last week sometime, and i've been meaning to post it. though it's only really interesting if you are as obsessed with the tube as i am.

oh yeah, the mirror also has the worst blog i've seen. worse than dubya's, definitely.

a very long time ago, in april in fact, i posted briefly about the proliferation of macs in our house. i said "there may be pictures of macs through the ages before the week is out". well i was wrong about that - although we did have the geekiest photo session in the history of the world - but now you can view the apple household on dave's site. yay.

i bought salam pax's book yesterday, because i think i'm probably going to write an essay on blogging and habermas' public sphere - y'know, is blogging the new pamphleteering, blah blah blah, and salam's blog is a great hook to hang it on. it's also an ace blog of course, and i'm enjoying the book.

Weathering

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